The original title to this blog post was supposed to be "Hardening SPARQL Servers in the wild". But I've since changed it to "Why you need a SPARQL server" after reading a number of articles critical of SPARQL while at the same time juggling RDF/OWL sources without SPARQL stores and a multitude of APIs. The benefits of having a machine readable export format is gaining traction with data providers as a data-delivery model. However, the lack of support for search and discovery is still hampering data-delivery.

The First World War took many by surprise. The speed of the German advance and the expectation of a short war meant that no large scale maps of mainland Europe were available. Another problem with war preparation in that era is that mapping another country was a certain sign of impending invasion, to the point that official surveyors would sometimes get arrested by the local authorities for spying.

Wikiwar is a new project that takes the crowd sourcing approach to the review of archives from the Second World War. Currently it is in alpha trials but the KML demo posted on the website looks very promising.

The Muninn Military and Organization ontologies have been released in OWL format on the Muninn RDF server and comments are welcome. These provide ontological terms for the markup of information about historical data and they provide more depth in terms of supporting changes to and the lineage of entities.

One of the ongoing problems with RDF markup and ontologies is that most of them are meant to support the expression of facts about the world as it currently is and not as it was or will be. This can create some issues in that most data is meant to be true at only one point in time.

The ontology includes support for military ranks, roles, organization types and service-specific chains of commands. Limited NATO rank equivalencies are provided and the country specific rank instances are being worked on. Any comments and suggestions are welcome.

A new OWL ontology has been released for the RDF markup of graves, human remains and commemorative monuments. It supports complex relationships between the remains, the grave and the different markers in use; recording the movement of remains is also possible as well as the linkage to the identity of the deceased.

The documentation is available here and the ontology in OWL format here. While the ontology is meant to support Muninn's data, it can be used on a stand alone basis for other projects.